“When the Burning began, items that professed criticism of Dragos were considered propaganda. Anyone caught with such items was accused of sorcery and killed, so the people of Revekka began to hide their journals however they could—within the brick of their fireplaces, buried in their gardens.”
“Dragos’s campaign against witches was mostly just an excuse to murder his enemies,” said Lothian.
It took me a moment to make out the letters on the page I’d pulled toward me, but soon my eyes adjusted and I read:
Dragos’s witch held another Reaping today. She claims to possess no magic and yet professes to sense it in others. Today, she pointed to anyone who accused her of witchcraft, and they were all burned in the square. These are dark times.
I looked at Lothian and Zann.
“Dragos’s witch?” I asked. “Ravena?”
“Yes,” said Zann. “She was excommunicated from High Coven for her support of Dragos’s agenda. Of course, when it came to the Burning, he protected her.”
I was not so surprised now that Adrian had made it his mission to find her.
Zann took me through a stack of items he’d pulled from his archives, organizing information by type. Most of them were journal entries and letters, and some were sketches depicting momentous events like the first night of the Burning. I found it horrific, maybe because I feared fire so much, but the series of images before me were ones from which I could feel the terror, woman after woman bound and burned at the stake. I knew from what I had already learned that there were thirteen members of High Coven, but here there were only twelve drawings.
“Someone is missing,” I said.
Lothian looked over my shoulder. “Ah, yes. Yesenia of Aroth. Dragos blamed her for the High Coven’s insubordination, so he forced her to watch each member of her coven die. She was last.”
“Was she their leader?” I asked.
“No, but she was appointed by High Coven as his court advisor,” said Lothian.
“I thought Ravena was,” I said, confused.
“She came after Yesenia was imprisoned. To the public, she claimed to have the ability to identify witches by sight, which meant she condemned anyone she did not like. She was truly evil.”
“Why was Yesenia imprisoned?” I asked.
“She was also said to be a powerful seer, though Dragos did not like what she foretold.”
“What did she foretell?”
“His downfall,” he answered. “Here she is.”
Lothian handed me another sketch, and I was startled both by this woman’s beauty and the lifelike way she was portrayed. She appeared to have dark features and darker skin. Her hair was long and black and her eyes matched, though they gleamed with a liveliness that felt a little unsettling given that this was a drawing made in charcoal.
She did not look evil, and as my eyes shifted back to the depiction of the first night of the Burning, I could only think about the terror she must have felt, watching twelve of her own perish and knowing that was her fate.
I learned more about High Coven. In particular, the names of the other twelve members. Each of them had a strength ranging from Yesenia’s gift of prophecy to manifestation, mediumship, healing, or shapeshifting. There were others too, powers I’d never heard of, like binding, which was the ability to take away someone’s magic, and bilocation, the ability to be in two places at once, and portal magic, the ability to create gateways to other places out of objects or from thin air. In addition to their specialization, each member of High Coven was responsible for their own minor covens.
Among the items Zann had brought were detailed notes from High Coven’s meetings, which itemized the issues they were presented with. In one instance, a terrible plague hit the northern part of Revekka. Ginerva, the healer, put forth a proposal to send her covens into the territory to perform spells to prevent the spread and heal those affected, but before it could even be considered, Yesenia was made to read the timelines and determine if High Coven could even interfere. Some things, it said, were by divine order. After Yesenia approved the measure, the coven set about establishing rules, namely that Odessa, the necromancer, was not allowed to reawaken any of those who had already passed, and Ginerva would be prevented from healing anyone who was fated to die, which required the skills of Yesenia’s coven.
I was beginning to see how they worked to care for their people, and I stayed, continuing to read until my eyes grew weary.
“How often may I return to read?” I asked before departing.